Article XIII. Abolished slavery. This was unjust and arbitrary. The slave owners had bought and paid for their slaves under legal and judicial sanction. To emancipate them without compensation to the owners was an unauthorized confiscation. England paid for her slaves in the West Indies when she set them free. But then, the British voters were property owners and believers in property rights.
Articles XIV and XV. These were intended to give the vote to the newly enfranchised Southern negroes. After producing much turmoil, political rascality and misgovernment in the South, the enforcement of these measures was abandoned and they are now dead letter provisions.
Article XVI. This was not a new measure; it provides for an income tax which it was formerly supposed could be levied, and was levied, till it was found by judicial inquiry that the Constitution had failed to authorize it. Its ratification was little more than a formality.
Article XVII. This provides for the election of senators in Congress by the people instead of by the legislatures. The result has been a strengthening of the bosses and a lowering of quality of members of the Senate.
Article XVIII. Prohibits the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors. A manifestly arbitrary and oppressive majority measure.
The operation of manhood suffrage in our great cities has clearly been tyrannical, because of the absence of proper restraint upon evil doers. Can any one truly say that the people of these cities have been benefited in the slightest degree, by the so-called privilege of voting for their magistrates or rulers? Assuming that their political bosses would let them vote as they wished, or that the bosses are popular agents, and that the people do or can govern in their cities, where is the public benefit? It seems to be generally conceded that on the whole the city of Washington is the best managed city in the Union, and it is governed by a Congress in whose choice the people of Washington have no share. Does any one find his comfort or his freedom curtailed or his life in danger in Washington? The fact is that the exercise of suffrage is a function, whose object is not to preserve liberty, but the opposite, namely, to establish proper control, and when that can be effectively done without popular elections everybody is better off.
The conclusion of the whole review of the relation between manhood suffrage and the liberty of the citizen is that happiness and all good results in the personal relations of men are to be found not in liberty, but in just law, order and restraint, which no one believes are better subserved by admission of the weak and ignorant to the suffrage; and that as sound political institutions and religious toleration were achieved without manhood suffrage in the past they would probably be safer without it in the future.
This leads one naturally to the subject of the operation of manhood suffrage in connection with government by majorities in the present day, which will be treated in the next chapter.
CHAPTER XXVI
AN UNQUALIFIED NUMERICAL MAJORITY RULE IS NOT IN ACCORD WITH GOOD STATESMANSHIP